The Sun and now the BBC have reported that a laptop used by a high-ranking RAF Officer at the UK’s  Ministry of Defence was stolen in late November; possibly much more recently that included an encryption key with the potential to open highly sensitive files. The laptop was said to be stolen from a highly secure area has arisen fears that a Mole is operating within the Ministry. If the severity of the breach is as serious as has been reported, this could be be one of the largest breaches of data security in a very long time.

It is not known if the laptop in question has been secured with disk encryption or any other type of techniques used in attempt to keep data from unauthorized parties.

As of writing this, the MoD has been bluntly quiet on the incident saying only that “An investigation is ongoing.”

Heads up to The Spy Blog UK for highlighting this

The network security guys at T-Mobile USA probably breached their underpants after some black hat or group of black hats named “Pwnmobile” posted on seclists.org a sizeable list of internal hostnames, OSes,  partial descriptions, internal IP addresses, and facilities relating to the back-end of T-Mobile’s customer management and services network.

At first, T-Mobile tried to say it was just a list pulled from a corporate document; but now the company is admitting that it was, in fact a major security breach according to a USA Today Blog and are not disclosing how much data was taken.  Odds are, if whoever managed to get this far, a very sizeable amount of data was captured. The person who made the posting mentioned that they had tried to sell the information to competitors, but they were not taken seriously.

On a slightly related note, the posting related the T-Mobile hack with Check Point. Does this mean a perimeter Check Point firewall was either hacked or exploited to gain access to this network? Only further elaboration from Pwnmobile, T-Mobile, or an insider can say. There have been several recently published high-visibility Check Point exploits and perhaps they were used in the hack.